[Sidenote: WALL-PAINTINGS OF “DANCE OF DEATH”]
More than one early wall-painting of the Dance existed in Basel in Holbein’s day, and there can be little doubt that the constant sight of them stirred his imagination, and influenced his conception of the subject when he in his turn made use of it. The earliest in point of date was the one in the Klingenthal nunnery in Little Basel, which is said to have been dated 1312; but it is doubtful whether much of this wall-painting remained by the beginning of the sixteenth century. Only a few badly-damaged portions were in existence in 1773, when it was rediscovered by Emanuel Büchel, a baker, who made coloured copies of what was left, which are now in the Basel Gallery. No traces of the original painting are now to be seen. The better-known Dance of the Dominican monastery in Great Basel in the suburb of St. John was of later date, executed probably towards the end of the fourteenth or early in the fifteenth century. According to tradition, for which there is no absolute proof, it was painted after the deliverance of Basel from the horrors of the terrible plague which raged there in 1439. It was copied or adapted from the older Klingenthal painting, closely following its arrangement of the various couples, but showing a great advance in artistic treatment, and in the variety and movements of the dancers. It consisted of about forty life-sized groups. In course of time it became so faded that in 1568 it was restored by Hans Hug Kluber, who made several additions to it; and it was again repaired in 1616, and in 1703. After that it was allowed to fall into a state of dilapidation, and in 1815 the wall of the cemetery of the monastery on which it was painted was pulled down by order of the Council, for the purpose of street improvements. A few remnants of it are still preserved in the Gallery, as well as coloured copies made by Emanuel Büchel in the same year as those he took from the Klingenthal painting. It is also well known from the engravings made after it by Merian in the seventeenth century.[475] This wall-painting was formerly regarded in Basel as the work of Holbein, a legend which was a long time dying. The mistake, no doubt, originally arose through the wide celebrity attained by the artist’s woodcut designs of the Dance, underneath which were printed verses taken from the older wall-paintings, so that the confusion between the two gradually grew, at first in Germany and elsewhere outside Switzerland, until in the end the error became established in Basel itself. At one time, too, the almost equally celebrated “Dance of Death” in the cemetery of the Dominican monastery in Berne, painted with the most biting satire by Niklaus Manuel, called Deutsch, was also attributed to Holbein. This wall-painting, which was finished before the year 1522, had completely perished by 1660, and the only records of it now remaining consist of a few drawings copied from it before its disappearance.